The French Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, resorted to alarmist messages this Sunday to mobilize an electorate that has turned its back on him and said that in the event of the victory of the extreme right or the left in the legislative elections there is a risk of financial crisis in the coming weeks.
In a long interview with public broadcaster France Inter, Le Maire He stated that, despite the fact that all the polls since the early call for legislative elections show the outgoing majority of the President’s Government as the big loser, Emmanuel Macronbelieves that the trend can be reversed: “We can win.”
A victory that would be possible with “an awareness of the seriousness of the moment, of what the projects of the extreme right and the extreme left would lead us to inexorably”, specifically “the methodical destruction of the economy of our country” with “a massive strike.
To illustrate this, he referred to the reactions of the financial markets throughout the week, which in his opinion “have not been wrong.”
In particular, he emphasized the increase in risk premium, that is to say. the interest differential between the French debt and that of the German debt that serves as a reference, with an increase of thirty basis points, when it had remained stable since 2022.
He pointed out that this represents a increase in the cost of financing French public debt of around €1 billion annuallyas well as an increase in the rates that individuals and companies will have to pay when they take out a loan.
Besides, warned of the “risk of a financial crisis in the coming weeks”. In this regard, he pointed out that the situation is very different from when the left came to power in 1981, because then the president was the socialist FRançois Mitterrandwhile now the left is dominated by a radical party, La Francia Insumisa (LFI) of Jean-Luc Melenchon.
Their argument is that while Mitterrand had then calmed the markets with advances that would eventually override his communist partners, now “it is the extreme left that will devour the social democrats.”
Because in his opinion, the scenario that they want to present for the elections on June 30 and June 7 is a duel of “extreme right against the extreme left” that ends up benefiting the first.
“The best fuel in (Jordan) Bardella (candidate for prime minister of the party of Marine Le Pen) is the extreme left, its economic follies, its chronic anti-Semitism and its destruction of French values,” he said, according to the Efe agency.
Beyond the short-term threats of a Bardella victory in the legislative elections, Le Maire said that “the risk for France in the coming decades is that the fundamental balance in the European Union is broken, which is the economic, political, geopolitical, military parity between France and Germany, which makes the balance of forces in Europe revolve around the Franco-German engine”.
According to his analysis, this would lead to “a Europe led by Germany with some satellites”a scenario that he wants to avoid and that “is one of the challenges of the legislative elections.”
Bruno Le Maire He began his political career on the conventional right, but left his party, The Republicans, to join Emmanuel Macron’s project with which he ran in 2017 as a candidate for the Elysée. Since then, he has been his Finance Minister and in practice the ‘number two’ of his governments.
But in the interview a distancing or at least a lack of understanding with the decision of the head of state to bring forward the elections.
When asked about this advance, the still minister did not want to evaluate it, beyond pointing out that it was “the decision of the President of the Republic (…). It is the decision of one man.”
“What I see,” he added, “is that it has generated concern, incomprehension and sometimes anger among the French people, throughout the country.”
